Oysters made Hampton man wealthy

Led by such enterprising pioneers as John Mallory Phillips, who owned his own fleet of oyster canoes, blacks played a crucial role in the early years of the oyster and crab-packing industry that made Hampton world famous after the Civil War. -- Mark St. John Erickson

Mark St. John Erickson, merickson@dailypress.com | 757-247-4783

Even before the Civil War, Hampton's busy waterfront boasted many free blacks who made their living as pilots, fishermen and boatmen.

Living side by side with whites who worked in the same maritime trades, they included such figures as Revolutionary War hero Cesar Tarrant, whose stand-out navigational skills and coolness under fire led the General Assembly to buy his freedom as a reward for "meritorious service."

Tarrant was long dead when a light-skinned African-American boy named John Mallory Phillips came to Hampton in the 1860s. But the enterprise and independence he represented lived on in the tide of free blacks and ex-slaves who saw the opportunity to determine their own fates by taking to the water.

Brought up in a household of oystermen, Phillips outdid even the most industrious of his peers, not only buying his own boat but going on to build a fleet of oyster canoes that worked the abundant Hampton Bar and nearby waters.

Within a dozen years he had acquired his own oyster beds, distinguishing him from the vast majority of white as well as black oyster tongers. Then he plowed his profits back into helping found such landmark enterprises as the Peoples Building and Loan Association — which financed hundreds of African-American homes in Hampton over the years — and the nationally known seaside resort for black vacationers at the Bay Shore Hotel in Buckroe.

"For all people, both black and white, the water became an increasingly important way to make a living in the late 1800s. But very few of either race became as prominent and influential as Phillips," said Hampton History Museum Curator J. Michael Cobb.

"Not only did he distinguish himself by building a business and employing other people but he also helped to build the black community — and he was widely respected by both blacks and whites as someone whose enterprise helped the town of Hampton recover and prosper after being destroyed by fire in the Civil War."

Uncommon roots

Little was known about Phillips' origins until his great-granddaughter Josephine H. Williams, a retired educator, began looking into her family's past more than 15 years ago.

Scouring federal Census records, she found him listed first in 1860 as a 4-year-old child living in the York County household of a free black woman named Rachel Banks.

A decade later, Phillips shows up in the Hampton household of his uncle — a black oysterman named Cary Hopson — who owned his own home and reported several other oystermen from the Banks family living in his dwelling.

With his light skin and straight hair, Phillip's appearance reflected the heritage of his father, a white York County farmer named John Phillips, and his light-skinned mother, whose mixed-race family reached far back into the colonial period, Williams says.

She also disputes the rumored link between the young freeman and Elizabeth City County planter Jefferson Curle Phillips, who commanded the local militiamen who burned Hampton in August 1861 to keep its buildings from being used by Union troops and the fast-growing population of fugitive slaves.

"I think it's a coincidence," Williams says, citing her Census documents as well as family lore.

"I don't think there's any relationship at all."

Waterborne entrepreneurs

What's not questioned by anyone is the role played by an enterprising band of light-skinned blacks — many of them free residents of Hampton before the war — in rebuilding the town and establishing half its businesses in the last decades of the 1800s.

Many of them were literate property owners in addition to sharing family names and relationships with prominent whites.

"The members of Hampton's 'free colored' community were a remarkably resourceful group," notes historian Robert F. Engs in his landmark book "Freedom's First Generation: Black Hampton, Va., 1861-1890."

"They made a great deal out of the opportunities they had," Engs wrote, "and, as a result, provided the nucleus of the postbellum black community that evolved over the next 30 years."

Phillips exploited these opportunities, too, toiling alongside other blacks drawn to Hampton because of its unusual racial openness and the occupational choices that enabled them to escape the world of farm labor and share-cropping that defined African-American life in outlying rural areas.

In 1880, Engs reported, more than 35 percent of the town's black workers made their living in such independent water-related trades as oystermen, fishermen, boatmen and sailors. Within these occupations, by far the largest number were oystermen, many of whom owned their own boats, made substantial sums during the oyster season and then fished, crabbed or hauled goods during the rest of the year.

None was more successful than Phillips, whose seven oyster canoes and large sloop mirrored the immense fleet of white New York emigre James S. Darling and the sprawling Hampton firm he built into the world's largest oyster business.

"From the beginning of Hampton's history, if you had a boat, you could make a living," Cobb says.

"But like Darling, Phillips' success clearly set him apart and made him a leader that other people would follow."

Investing in people

Early in 1889, Phillips was one of 11 far-sighted black men who met in the basement of Hampton's First Baptist Church to form the Peoples Building and Loan Association.

Within two years, the pioneering institution reported nearly $15,000 in assets. That grew to $75,000 in 1898 and then $196,000 in 1913, when Phillips served as president.

By 1941, the association was the largest of its kind in the country, a Hampton Institute professor reported. It had financed hundreds of homes and saved a large number of others by taking over the mortgages.

Though most of those houses have long since been razed by downtown redevelopment, they once crowded the north and west parts of old Hampton, stretching out for blocks as far as the eye could see.

"You just can't underestimate the meaning of the Peoples Building and Loan Association and its importance to the rebuilding of Hampton," Cobb says.

"This was the only place where blacks could go to find money to buy property — and what blacks wanted more than anything except freedom after the Civil War was to own their own land."

Nine years later, Phillips joined other black entrepreneurs to buy land at Buckroe Beach for what would become one of America's largest and best-known African-American resorts.

Lured by nationally known entertainers, black families and business conventions flocked there during the summer — and Phillips took guests aboard his big sloop for Chesapeake Bay excursions.

"For years, the Bay Shore Hotel has been the mecca of the Negro vacationist," a 1940 government report noted.

Phillips became prominent in the life of Hampton's historic Zion Baptist Church, too, serving the pioneering 1863 congregation as a deacon for 30 years.

Among his other legacies is a Hampton River home downtown that remains in the family today, not to mention a tradition of enterprise and community service that led his grandson and namesake to found his own seafood business and — in 1974 — become Hampton's first black councilman since Reconstruction.

"It's no accident that Phillips' grandson became a city councilman and vice-mayor," Cobb says.

"He left some big shoulders to stand on."

Online: Go to dailypress.com/blackwatermen to see archival pictures of the black contribution to Hampton's early seafood industry.